The Painted Tent (11 page)

The loft door which was open behind her was held in place by a small bar on its rear side which was hooked into a stout staple which had been driven into one of the cross-beams of the roof timbers that straddled the inside of the loft. The hook and staple were strong, but the wood of the cross-beam, though its heart was a solid core of oak, had an outer lay of ancient wood which had been bored and tunnelled by woodworm. Each time the wind roared into the loft and then was drawn back like a violently receding wave, the suction wrenched at the loft door, trying to draw it shut. And each time the door jerked under the vacuum pull of the wind the staple worked a little looser.

Finally, as the first grey light of dawn struggled through the curtains of wind-driven rain, the gale smashed against the face of the bam, shaking its roof and timbers, soared upwards, howled around the loft and then was drawn back in a fierce outgoing eddy, violent with turbulence and power. The staple was pulled from its beam and the loft door was sucked back with a speed and savagery that would have killed anything which barred its path. The door crashed into its frame, shattering and bursting it outwards. Timbers and woodwork flew out into the air and the door, torn from its hinges, followed on the heels of an explosion of sound like a crack of thunder. The wind took the door, lifted it, and sent it slicing high through the air as though it had been a sheet of paper. (It was found two days later by Bob and Bill in a field of young wheat at the top of the hill road at the brow of the valley.)

And with the door went Fria.

The great crash of the door slamming into and through its frame six inches below and behind her was like the report of a cannon being fired close to her. She jumped with fear on her beam and half spread her wings in panic. The wind took her. Wings wide, her long tail-feathers spread, the wind sucked her up like a straw and she was whipped across the face of the barn and then swung round its corner. As though the gale were some living, malicious personality treating her like a new toy in its old, old game, it flung her skywards on a great updraught of eddying and coiling currents of air. She went up five hundred feet in a few seconds and, as she went, she was pitched and somersaulted out of control.

A fully mature and experienced peregrine with all its powers could have ridden the wind and would have known better than to fight the impossible. A fully mature and experienced peregrine would never voluntarily have put to flight in such a wind and – if caught in one – would have gone to ground, to eyrie or to shelter as quickly as it could along the line of least resistance, stooping with the wind's direction and flattening its line of dive long before sanctuary was too dangerously near.

Fria had no such wisdom. In a panic she fought the air with her wings, and the wind took the resistance she gave and flipped her over and upwards in a ragged series of back-somersaults. When Fria righted herself she was a thousand feet above ground, though she could see little of it in the pale morning light because of the scuds of driving rain that charged across the land in rolling onslaughts.

Fria wailed with panic, caught sight of the bam far below her, and automatically, since it represented shelter, half rolled, closed her wings and began to dive towards it as she had once come down from high above the rookery to her bathing-place. The manoeuvre did her no good at all. The power of the wind, rising almost vertically beneath her, held her where she was for a moment and then lifted her and rolled her over and over. She was swung up another five hundred feet, and the howling and roaring of the wind around her filled her mind with a greater panic.

For some seconds the gale threw her about the sky in its updraught and then spewed her out of its ascending vortex into the gale-force main stream of its south-easterly path. There, from luck, chance, or some dim ancestral bodily memory that informed her muscles and wings, she found herself doing the right thing. With three-quarter-closed wings, her tail feathers tight in a narrow wedge shape, her head lowered, she found herself going downwind fast and slowly losing height.

Her panic eased a little with the discovery, and she leaned on the back of the wind, increased her glide to a faster dive, and came down through the rain and saw the earth coming up to her fast. She saw trees, woods, fields, the dark shine of a flooded river and then, away to her right, the rain-darkened stonework of a building that reminded her of the barns and Bullaybrook Farm.

Full of fear, but calmer now that she was under some sort of control, Fria leaned across the wind and wore down the gale in a fast, curving arc and – because she wanted to do it – her natural flight powers obeyed her and she began to flatten her descent though she did not slacken it much. She flashed dangerously low across the tossing, waving tops of a wide expanse of fir plantation, dropped below its far edge into shelter from the gale, and found herself heading fast for the sprawling bulk of the grey stone building she had seen. She curved across the building ten feet above it and, now in some primitive control of herself, threw up sharply and then had to fight the upsurging momentum of her own body with rapid brake-beats of her wings. A few seconds later she landed clumsily in tall grasses fifty yards from the building. She sat, hidden in the wet grasses, the rain beating down on her. She sat, half crouched, her wings half spread, the rain striking down at them, and she wailed three or four times like a lonely, unhappy, lost child. But as with an untutored, immature child one emotion moves on erratic impulse rapidly to another, Fria felt sudden anger in herself. Her wailing ceased. At this moment, since her eyes never missed any movement, she saw something stir in the tall grasses a couple of feet from her.

It was a little shrew that had been flooded out of its earth burrow. Fria jumped forward and angrily grabbed at it with her beak. Her powerful mandibles clamped across its tiny neck and killed it. For a moment Fria sat with it in her beak. Then with a toss of her head she jerked it from her.

Smiler was full of dismay when he discovered that Fria had gone. The manner of her going was no mystery to him or to Bob and Bill.

‘That old door, Sammy, must have come out like a shell from a gun. But if she was up on the beam it wouldn't have hit her,' said Bill. ‘Don't you worry. She'll be back when she gets hungry.'

But Smiler was far from content with that. Fria was not a homing pigeon. The gale could have blown her miles away, and the gale was still blowing. She might, perhaps, have been injured, broken a wing or something, and be somewhere in the nearby woods and fields. He decided that he just had to try and find her. If she were uninjured and wanted to stay free … well, that was all right with him. But if she were injured … well, then he had a duty to try and find her.

That day was a Saturday and he finished work at mid-day. He ate a hurried lunch and then cycled up to Mr Samkin and borrowed his binoculars. From then until the light went he spent his time cycling around the countryside and along the paths in the Forestry Commission plantations looking for Fria. The wind was still blowing hard, but the rain had now slackened to occasional fierce showers.

Smiler went to every high point he could think of and searched the sky and then the countryside for a sign of the falcon. But he had no luck. He went to Highford House. He sat there for half an hour, sweeping his glasses round and round. But there was no sign of Fria. At least no sign that he could recognize, though he passed one as he left the place by way of the overgrown garden. The limp, bedraggled mole-grey body of a dead shrew lay in the grass. And he would have been surprised – and delighted – if he could have known that Fria was watching him as he moved about the building and the garden.

Fria recognized him. But that was all. She was no familiar dog or cat to come to him, eager to make herself known. She sat where she was and watched him go. Neither hunger nor thirst had worried her yet, but there was a difference in her which now informed all her movements and emotions. She had ridden the gale. The memory of her panic had gone but not, probably, the memory of the way she had finally used the wind to achieve sanctuary of a kind. Like all creatures, once she had done something the repetition of the act presented no fears. She learned by doing; and the more often a thing was done the more adept a creature became at it. Nature is a rough teacher, but her lessons stick, or else …

Smiler cycled back to the farm with a long face and it was made longer when the Duchess reminded him that Sandra was coming to dinner – a return invitation which the Duchess had insisted he make because he had been to Sandra's party. Smiler groaned, and groaned again when the Duchess said, ‘And what's more, you've only got half an hour to bath and change before she comes. And, of course –' she grinned and reached out and pulled his snub nose – ‘you'll walk her home in the dark afterwards like a perfect gentleman. And you needn't think you're being untrue to that Laura of yours. She's not sitting at home every night doing her knitting and mooning about you. Now get off with you – and don't fuss about that bird. God's hand is large and it casts a wide shadow over the world.'

‘Who said that?' asked Smiler.

‘Well, I did of course. I just said it.'

‘Oh, I thought it was a quotation.'

‘Well, thank you, Sammy. But remember – there's no wisdom in any book which wasn't first spoken by someone.'

Smiler paused at the door and with a grin said, ‘ Do I really have to walk her home?' Then he ducked out of the doorway to avoid a cushion being thrown at him. The Duchess went off into the kitchen chuckling to herself. But once she was alone and the thought of Smiler's falcon came back to her her face grew serious. She was remembering something Jimmy had said before she had told him not to stay at the farm any longer.

‘If freedom is your right, then it's better to die than let any man take it from you. And, if needs be, it's better to be hunted all your life than live in a cage.'

That evening was not the ordeal which Smiler had thought it might be. Sandra looked very nice in a blue dress which contrasted with her fair complexion and blonde hair. It was curious. Smiler decided, how once you got used to something you almost stopped noticing it, like the slight prominence of her aquiline nose. In fact, too, the word aquiline pleased him because he had only recently discovered it in his reading and following Mr Samkin's instructions never to pass a new word without looking it up in the dictionary – he knew that it came from the word
aquila
– the golden eagle. Hooked like an eagle's beak … ‘ Well, be fair, Samuel M.,' he told himself, ‘it wasn't really as bad as that.'

Over dinner the Duchess told them tales of her circus life and how she had been born in a horse-drawn caravan in a field somewhere on the south side of Dartmoor. When she was old enough she had worked with her mother selling the wooden clothes-pegs her father and brothers made from door to door, and posies of spring and summer flowers, until the day had come when she was a young woman and had met her husband, the Duke. She had gone into the circus with him and started her career as a fortune teller. But after he had died her heart had turned from the circus and, with the money she had saved, she had bought Bullaybrook Farm and retired.

When dinner was over they played three-handed cards and put records on the player, though neither Sandra nor Smiler thought much of the records because they were donkey's years old. Then the old piano was opened up and Smiler, who in the past months had spent a lot of time on it and, having a good ear, had taught himself to play quite well, gave them some of the songs they knew and others that he had learnt from his father. While he played one of his father's favourites,
The Streams of Lovely Nancy
, he wondered where his father was at that moment and how long it would be before he saw him and between them they could get all his troubles sorted out so that he could go full steam ahead with his ambition to be a vet.

Walking Sandra back up the hill to her village afterwards it was very dark and half-way up the hill Sandra stumbled and took his arm to keep her balance. And then she kept her hand on his arm and, somehow, a little later Smiler found that she was holding his hand. He felt very embarrassed about it but clearly Sandra did not consider it anything strange.

She said, ‘If you're going to do all this studying why don't you try to be a doctor? After all that's a much better thing than spending your time with dirty old animals and birds.'

Smiler said indignantly, ‘Animals and birds aren't dirty – not if people keep them properly. And, anyway, being a vet is harder than being a doctor. After all, people can tell a doctor where they've got their pains and aches and, if he's done his stuff, well, he ought to know how to treat them. But animals can't speak. You've got to … well, sort of get into their minds for them and find out what's wrong sometimes.'

Sandra said, ‘You've always got an answer, haven't you?' And then, going off at a tangent, she went on, ‘I had a good look tonight, and you know, I don't think that is a wig the Duchess wears. It's her own hair. But why does she wear it in those tight little curls?'

‘If you're so interested – why didn't you ask her?'

At the front door of Sandra's house, she paused in the darkness before going in and said very politely, ‘Well, thank you very much, Sammy, for a very pleasant evening.'

‘Thank you for coming.'

Sandra laughed and said, ‘And now, if you want to, you can kiss me goodnight.'

Startled, Smiler blurted out, ‘Good Lord, I couldn't do that!'

Sandra giggled. ‘Why not?'

‘Well … well, you don't. You don't kiss people unless you love them.'

‘And you don't love me?' asked Sandra teasingly.

‘Of course I don't.'

‘Who do you love then?'

‘That's none of your business.'

‘I don't care if it isn't. And, anyway, I kiss people because I like them and they've been nice to me. So –' She leaned forward and gave him a smacking great kiss on the cheek and nearly poked his left eye out with her nose.